Nearly a century ago, something good started to happen to Americans who
consume peanuts -- not just kids with sandwiches in their lunchbox and
old men in rocking chairs, mind you, but also tens of thousands of hard-working
Americans who labor in factories making candy, and peanut butter, and
all kinds of products processed in peanut oil.

Technology and the spread of the agricultural revolution -- increased
harvests due to pesticides and fertilizer and better farming methods --
started to reduce the price of peanuts. And peanut prices tend to drop
even further when competition is allowed from imported foreign peanuts,
of course -- often grown in poor countries to which the U.S. doesn't have
to send so much "stabilizing" foreign aid if people there are
simply allowed to sell their produce into the hungry American market.

So how do you suppose the United States government responded to this
trend, with its potential to leave even poor Americans better fed for
less money?

Why, by steeping in and putting an end to it, of course. Several thousand
peanut farmers in Georgia and Texas and Alabama were very upset by falling
peanut prices. Given the choice between searching for more profitable
crops during the Great Depression or simply calling their congressmen,
they called their congressmen. Up went the protective tariff barriers,
up went the expensive government "peanut quota" boondoggle to
protect existing farmers (and those to whom they chose to sell their "quotas"),
and back up went the price of peanuts ... reaching $610 per ton last year
for those who held the quotas, as opposed to a mere $150 a ton for those
who didn't.

Yes, the "temporary relief" program has now been in effect
for 70 years.

And among the investors who now hold those limited but highly profitable
"peanut quotas" is the John Hancock Insurance Co. (The beneficiaries
of this decades-old scam, some as far afield as Anchorage, Alaska and
New York City, grew irate when the Environmental Working Group, a research
and advocacy organization, recently posted their congressional subsidies,
by name, on the Internet.)

$1.2 billion ain't peanuts

The current situation being so transparently absurd, Congress now debates
spending $1.2 billion or more over the next five years to buy out 70,000
"quota holders," who argue they often had to borrow heavily
to purchase their quotas and would thus be ruined if the whole scheme
were to be simply abandoned. (The price of the transferrable "quotas"
has now risen into the millions of dollars, the same way it will for anything
which is held by the government in artificially short supply.)

Indeed, $1.2 billion might even be worthwhile, if when Congress was done
the free market in peanuts were fully restored, import restrictions removed,
the price of peanuts allowed to fall where it may, and farmers left to
thrive or fail as best they can in that open market.

But that's not what Congress intends, of course. Oh no. Instead, the
cautious fiduciary guardians of our public treasure now propose "to
replace the peanut quotas with a new system of direct subsidies to growers
-- similar to those now handed out to corn, wheat and cotton farms,"
The Associated Press reveals.

So, do I have this straight? We taxpayers (the only ones not consulted)
have to pay the peanut farmers -- and thousands of absentee "quota
holders" -- $1.2 billion to keep them in business this year,
so they'll still be there next year to accept more billions in
direct cash handouts? All to prevent the disaster of Americans
finding themselves awash in cheap peanuts?

O brave new world, that hath such creatures in it.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
Review-Journal, a monthly contributor to "Shotgun News," and
the author of "Send in the Waco Killers." For information on
his monthly newsletter, "Privacy Alert," or on his new book,
"The Ballad of Carl Drega," write 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684,
Reno, NV 89503; e-mail privacyalert@thespiritof76.com;
or dial 775-348-8591.